Socket 754: Best Athlon 64 mobo pick

[teckcin]

Hello everyone. I just purchased an Athlon 64 3200+ and now I need to make a crucial buying decision, a motherboard. I am torn between the Aus K8V deluxe, the Abit K8V Max 3 and MSI's offering.

The different tech sites around the web seem to differ as well as far as their recommendations.

Any opinions? I would greatly appreciate any feedback as I have to make this decision sometime tomorrow. Thanks!

[s3v]

Are you planning to ovverclock it? (not that the Athlon64s seem to O/C all that well....) if you are, buy an NF3 based board so you can lock the PCI frequency.

If not, I would buy the Asus K8V.

There are some ALi and SiS boards coming to the market, and by all accounts the ALi comes out on top in many tests. Im not 100% sure if there are any around just yet?

The VIA chipset offers full bandwith on the HT bus, but only 533Mhz between the north and south bridge chips. NF3 is a single chip solution, but they cant get a clean enough signal above 800Mhz (someone correct me on that figure if im wrong) on the HT bus, so its swings and round-a-bouts.

My past experience with Abit? YUCK..... Asus has always been my friend.... and Ive never used an MSI board.

I work for a Biostar disty, and I have one of thier NF2 boards and its great, and no where near the price of an Asus board.... I konw the Biostar Althon64 boards do very very well and the K8T800 based ones are always in the top 5 for performance.

But thats my personal opinion, not a sales pitch

[teckcin]

Under ideal circumstances (wishful thinking probably) I would like to overclock the chip to 2.2 ghz, which would put it on par with the much more expensive Athlon FX chip, due to the FX's performance hit from using registered memory.

The ALI and SIS chipsets do look to be superior than VIA and Nvidias offering overall but all of the reviews I have seen are based on reference boards and I know of no official support from one of the big motherboard companies endorsing the chipset. Most companies have already thrown their support behind VIA or Nvidia and I think its unlikely that any of the enthusiast mobo companies plan to launch another seperate product based on one of these chipsets. Someone will do it, but I doubt it will be Asus, Abit, etc.

[[GSV]Myocardial]

I'm having exactly the same dilema as you atm, I've looked at both and the only thing swinging it for me atm towards Abit is the fact that I've had good experience with their boards of late, and my last ASUS was a BX board so rather a while back.

I don't think any of these initial offerings are going to be particularly conducive to good overclocking, their abit like "beta boards" in the sense that the manufacturers will iron out any problems with them, although reports seem to be pretty good with compatability

[Davion]

I should go for the ABIT KV8-MAX 3 , i am also going to buy that !

btw the PCI prots from nForce³ is NOT locked and the HyperTransport only runs on 600Mhz instead of 800Mhz AND is only 8 bit upstream instead of 16bits !

Here can you see the Unlockes PCi bus !

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx...var1=64&var2=0

[s3v]

Ah - yes - you are right... /my bad.. perhaps its the via boards? o_O

[Firelord]

Originally posted by s3v
Are you planning to ovverclock it? (not that the Athlon64s seem to O/C all that well....) if you are, buy an NF3 based board so you can lock the PCI frequency.

Where did you read that?? Having being to XtremeSystems forums and the way that their AMD A64/FX-51s are OCing I have to disagree!! Opp got 30K on 3DK1SE with an FX-51!!

They produce some amazing Lobby and Nature scores!! AMD FX-51 @ 2.95GHz outperforms the P4EE at 4.4GHz!!

[s3v]

the FX seems to scale well, but the Athlon64 doesnt....

[Stoo]

Where did you read that?